A Man of Parts Read Online Free PDF Page A

one year the door has been offered me – the door that goes into peace, into delight, into a beauty beyond dreaming, a kindness no man on earth can know. And I have rejected it .’
    As Anthony reaches this point in his reading, the telephone rings. It is Jean. He is annoyed to be interrupted just a page or two short of the story’s ending, which he has forgotten, and fails to put the usual note of tenderness into his voice in their exchange of greetings.
    ‘Is something the matter, darling?’ Jean asks.
    ‘No. I was just deep in one of H.G.’s stories.’
    ‘Well, I’m sorry to intrude,’ she says ironically. ‘Shall I ring back later?’
    ‘No, no, of course not,’ he says. ‘I’m a bit upset, to tell you the truth. I’ve just had a rather painful telling-off from the old man.’ He gives her a brief précis of his conversation with H.G.
    ‘He’s got a bit of a nerve, hasn’t he?’ says Jean. ‘He wasn’t exactly a model of matrimonial fidelity himself, from what you’ve told me.’
    Anthony gives a dry chuckle. ‘No indeed. But he didn’t like it when I sort of reminded him of that.’
    ‘Perhaps I should meet him,’ Jean says. ‘If he’s so susceptible, perhaps I could win him over.’
    ‘Not now, darling,’ Anthony says hastily. ‘Not yet.’
    When the telephone call is over, he returns immediately to the story to find out what happens to Wallace. Oh yes, it comes back to him. He is found at the bottom of a deep shaft under construction for an extension to the London Underground, having gone through a door, carelessly left unlocked, in the temporary hoarding enclosing the building site, and fallen to his death – either accidentally or, more probably, deliberately. ‘ We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our daylight standard he walked out of security, into darkness, danger, death. But did he see like that? ’
    Meanwhile, in the small sitting room of the main house, the interlocutor has turned interrogator.
    – You only loved three women in your life: Isabel, Jane and Moura?
    – Yes.
    – Two wives and one mistress .
    – I wanted to marry Moura after Jane died.
    – But she refused .
    – Yes.
    – Perhaps she was afraid you wouldn’t want to have sex with her any more if you were married .
    – What do you mean by that?
    – Well, both your marriages were sexual failures, weren’t they?
    – I would say disappointments rather than failures.
    – Isabel disappointed you in bed?
    – I was starving for sex when we married, but she couldn’t respond. I was an inexperienced lover, and she was a deeply conventional young woman.
    – So fairly soon you sought more exciting sex with other women? Like that little assistant of hers?
    – I didn’t seek out Ethel Kingsmill, she took the initiative. But yes, she showed me that there were women in the world who had the same appetites as I had.
    – And a year or so later you left Isabel for your student, Amy Catherine Robbins – ‘Jane’ as you curiously renamed her .
    – I didn’t like the name Catherine, which she used because she didn’t like ‘Amy’, so I chose a new name for her.
    – Not a very romantic one though, was it? No erotic associations. ‘Plain Jane’ … Jane Austen …
    – What about Jane Eyre? She was passionate enough.
    – Do you like that novel?
    – No, since you ask. But—
    – You left Isabel for Jane, and eventually married her, but as you say in your Autobiography she turned out to be just as disappointing in bed as Isabel. Isn’t it rather puzzling that you exchanged one sexually inhibited spouse for another? As Oscar might have said, ‘once is unfortunate, twice looks like carelessness ’.
    – What are you getting at?
    – Perhaps secretly, subconsciously, you never really wanted a fully sexual woman as a wife. Perhaps you only really enjoy sex when it is wild, unlicensed, transgressive. Perhaps Moura suspected that .
    – Nonsense!
    – Is it?
    ‘He’s talking to